Literature & Literary Studies
March 2021
How to Think Like Ulysses
What the Classics Can Teach Us about Life
by Bianca Sorrentino
What can the Trojan War tell us about women’s empowerment and immigration? What can the myth of Ulysses tell us about human agency when it is pitted against seemingly unsourmountable circumstances? And what about Orpheus? What can his figure teach us about humanity and its relationship with death? We tend to look at the Classics as dusty, as things from the past, something to study in a college course, but the truth is that they are far more modern than we think, and they can shed a marvellous light on what it means to be humans in the 21st century. Written with a charming levity that cleverly masks years of research, How to Think Like Ulysses is a heartfelt plea to rediscovers the literary wonders of the ancient world and to heed their lesson: life in our contemporary world may be very much different from Athens in the 5th century B.C., but perhaps we didn’t change as much.
